


Godspeed

by LokiOfSassgaard



Category: Life on Mars (UK)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-02-17
Updated: 2009-02-17
Packaged: 2018-05-28 01:23:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6308755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LokiOfSassgaard/pseuds/LokiOfSassgaard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gene slowly learns a little bit about who Sam Tyler really is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Godspeed

He wouldn’t go as far as to say that he’d hated Sam Tyler. Despised, occasionally. Sickeningly annoyed, most certainly, but all things considered, the man was a good copper. He knew his stuff, even if Gene did pretend to ignore it, and something did have to be said for Sam being the only one of those lousy bastards who helped clear him of that murder.

Even so, he rarely paid Sam much thought, only talking about him when pissed drunk, and even then, only when someone else mentioned him first. And it was always a predictable path. He’d accuse the man of being stark raving loony, but would jump to his defence soon as anybody tried to agree that yes, Sam Tyler was completely off his nut. Three drinks later, he’d begin to not only defend him, but begin to talk about him as though he were some sort of a god. And though it was never spoken, everyone knew to keep their damn mouths shut about it the next day when everyone was sobered back up.  
Gene first bega n to notice it when news of the Watergate scandal started popping up from the States. He convinced himself that Sam simply knew something the general British public didn’t. Read the right newspapers or knew the right people.

But Sam had known something the general public didn’t, hadn’t he. He’d told Gene that it was going to happen, and it did. And it wasn’t as though he was vague about it, or anything, speculating that one day, some random president was going to be recorded in the White House doing evil deeds. He mentioned Nixon by name, and a year later, the BBC – along with every other major news network in the Western World – was reporting the president’s resignation.  
He remembered very clearly the day the station received the bulletin, because it was the day Ray launched into a sudden rage that landed him in hospital. Some hippie quack sent to look at him started talking about some newly-recognised disorder, which Gene was quick to defend agai nst. He insisted that his officers were all fit and able, but the quack insisted that it was mental, called post-traumatic stress, and that it stemmed from some event in Ray’s past. Gene ignored the man, insisting that the outburst was something else, entirely. Family problems, or something.

The next morning, he got around to reading the bulletin that Ray had been looking at when he started screaming. Direct from the Met itself, official procedure for handling IRA bomb threats, and how to identify a proper IRA attack.

And then Gene remembered the car bomb, and how Sam had insisted that it wasn’t IRA, and probably a hoax. Well, he’d been wrong about the hoax, but he knew before anyone that it wasn’t the Irish. Everything he said about code words and time frame was exactly what the Met had sent down. He even remembered, much against his will, that Sam had diagnosed Ray in the Railway Arms with some sort of fruity stress syndrome.  
The telly was droning on about the latest elections, but Gene didn’t care. He was hardly listening, instead going back over an ancient case file. They thought it was cut and dry, solved and in the bag for over ten years, but some workers discovered a set of human remains not even a klick from where they’d made the arrest. He was sealed off in his own little universe, trying to find a hole in the old case that could for certain tie everything together, but something on the telly caught his ears, and he looked up suddenly. Some MP from up north was rambling on about changes to Sedgefield, and all sorts of bollocks that nobody outside of Sedgefield would give a toss about. Then, it cut back to the news reader, who continued to talk about Mr. Blair’s plans for the future.

Gene sat silent for a few moments before flipping madly through the case notes. He stared down at the notations from when Sam and Annie were undercover during the case. Surely, it was coincidence. Sam was from Hyde, and the name was picked at random. Completely and entirely at random. Why on earth would he know some nobody politician from fuckall nowhere? It wasn’t as though Tony Blair were actually doing anything for the whole of the country, was it?. He uneasily pushed his feelings aside, changed the channel on the telly with his new magic wand remote control, and returned to reading over case notes.  
The year he retired, the right to silence script was changed. Something about it bothered Gene, but he couldn’t quite figure out what it was. It wasn’t until hearing Chris say the wrong thing for about the twentieth time that he remembered Sam, and his complete inexplicable inability to remember the proper words. The idiot had even been corrected by the people he was trying to arrest. He was sure he was remembering it wrong, but he could almost swear that Sam kept saying what Chris seemed to completely fail to remember.

Everything was changing so quickly, Gene knew he was a r elic. Too much technology and spying on people, while being out there, on the street seemed to happen less and less. He knew he’d done all right though, when he was able to think about retiring and didn’t have that one last case, that final vendetta to settle. His only real battle was getting out before he had to go down and greet the new patch of potential CID trainees. They were all the same; dumb and naive, and they’d be lucky to get one good DC out of the whole lot. It was the same every time, and Gene was more than willing to pass the job on to the new DCI.  
If Gene Hunt was good at anything, it was remembering the details. He sometimes hated the details, but he remembered the damn things, and that’s why he was a DCI. And it was the details that startled him right out of his seat.

It wasn’t so much that some MP from Sedgefield was running for Prime Minister (as much as it surprised him to see that name come up in the news again, he knew it shouldn’ t have bothered him at all), but it was another name that was in the same news segment. The Labour Party was going through all sorts of changes, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer was one of them.

He didn’t need old case notes and closed files to recognise the name. He needed a stiff drink. That name had been pulled out completely at random, and now his own undercover persona was in parliament.  
He felt like an idiot, but he had to prove it to himself. It was all just a coincidence. Just his brain playing tricks with him as he got older. He was remembering things wrong, and he needed to give himself a good kick in the arse.

Finding the number was easy enough, and he rang up the Hyde offices, asking to speak with Detective Sam Tyler. The man on the other end informed him politely that there was no Sam Tyler, detective or otherwise, in Hyde. When Gene insisted that he needed to speak with him, the man insisted that prank calls were regarded in all seriousnes s, and hung up.

And normally, being hung up on would infuriate him, but this one time, Gene felt he could relax; felt like everything was normal and right, and that it was just his own mind playing tricks on him after all.  
It was big news, and the ripple was felt through all of Manchester, and Gene had missed it. He was too busy being in hospital, being told that if he knew what was good for him, he’d curb his drinking, or better yet, stop all together. When the doctors finally decided that he wasn’t going to drop dead at a moment’s notice, he wasted no time in kicking the nurses out of his room and fixing to leave, informing them to damn their protocol, and he’d see himself out, thanks.

As he struggled to find the lift that would take him down to ground level, and thus home, he found himself in a very quiet hall, lined with very quiet rooms.

Very quiet, aside from one. He could hear a woman talking softly, her voice carrying over the tiled flo or in whispers.

“Sam? Sam? Can you hear me?”

He knew he shouldn’t be there, but that had never stopped him before. He slowly walked down the hall, finally coming to an open door. Cautiously, he peered in, finding an older woman sitting beside someone lying on their back, and connected to an extensive life support system.

“It's Mum. Sam? Sammie?”

“Sammie?” Gene said aloud before he could stop himself. The woman jumped slightly, looking angrily startled up at Gene. “Sorry,” Gene said, stepping back slightly. “I thought I...” thought what? “Thought I heard someone else, luv.”

The woman looked hard at Gene for a long moment. “Have we met?” she asked. She stood slowly, casting a sad glance to the figure on the bed before stepping closer to Gene. “I’m sure we have.”

Gene looked at her for a moment before introducing himself. “Gene Hunt,” he said. “Might have seen me in the papers,” he explained. “For mer DCI.”

The woman smiled uneasily. “A friend of Sam’s then?” she asked. “The doctors say it’s good for him, to hear familiar voices.”

Gene nervously stepped over to the prone figure, his heart almost stopping. “You must be Ruth Tyler,” he said before he could stop himself.

“That’s right,” she said.

He wanted to ask what had happened, but couldn’t come up with a combination of words that wouldn’t make him sound like a complete idiot. Standing there, in the cold hospital room, he already knew the answer, though. There was really no need to ask.

He stood for only a few moments before deciding that it might be safer to leave. Before he could say anything profoundly stupid and risk sounding every bit as mental as Sam had. He lightly placed his hand on Sam’s shoulder, sighing softly. “Godspeed, Sammie boy,” he said quietly before turning to leave, nodding slightly at Ruth as he left.


End file.
